Transpacific Sound Paradise presents:

FUN WORLD MUSIC FACTS

...and maybe a few myths

Compiled by Rob Weisberg / Illustrations by Cecile Cloutier.

You have at your fingertips "Fun World Music Facts", produced
by the braintrust of Transpacific Sound Paradise, WFMU's
weekly world pop music radio extravaganza currently heard Sundays 8-10 pm (New
York City), 90.1fm (upstate New York), and on the web.

I hope that beyond enjoying these items for their intrinsic entertainment
value, you may also be inspired to look further into the musical cultures
behind them. I encourage you to check out some of the print sources I've listed
below. Many of these sources as well as related recordings are in the
collections of the New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (212)
870-1630. [The library's collections have
been temporarily relocated to 521 W43 St (research) and 5th Ave at 40th St
(circulating)]. Most bookstores can order the books I've consulted. A few of my
favorite independent bookshops in New York are St. Marks Books on 3rd
Avenue north of St. Marks Place (212) 260-7853, Coliseum Books at Columbus Circle (212) 757-8381, and See Hear Music Magazines and Books
at 59 E7 St (212) 505-9781. You may also
wish to refer to the reading list and shop listings in the Wasted Vinyl
Shopping Guide, a document which can also be found here at the WFMU website.

FUN WORLD MUSIC FACTS

1.Brass confusion:

Indian brass bands, often hired to
entertain at weddings and festivals, generally please the crowds by playing
renditions of popular film songs along with the occassional folk song. But
there's one decidedly un-Indian song that's absolutely mandatory in any Indian
band's repertoire: "Tequila." (From Booth, Gregory: "Brass
Bands" in the journal Ethnomusicology, vol.34#2 spring/summer 1990. See
also the CD "Disco Bhangra", Discunion label, Japan.)

2.Creative boundaries:

Kenyan musicians are sometimes
forced to play gigs while locked inside metal cages! Why? Nairobi nightclub
musicians often don't have enough money to buy their instruments - the
equipment is instead provided by clubowners. Some owners literally imprison the
musicians on stage to make sure they don't steal or damage the equipment. (From
Malm, Krister and Wallis, Roger: Big Sounds from Small Peoples, Constable,
London, 1984.)

3.Eternal bonds:

In the 30s and 40s, the highest
compliment a black South African jazz player could receive was a favorable
comparison with one of his American peers. Some folks really took these
comparisons to heart - Sullivan Mphahlele's keyboard style was so reminiscent
of Fats Waller's that not only was he often called "Fats Waller", but
he also died on the same day as Fats! (From Ballantine, Christopher Marabi
Nights, Ravan, Johannesburg, 1993.)

4.Folkie firepower:

When rural Pakistani folksinger
Zarsanga sings in public, fans routinely mark the choruses of her most popular
Peshto-language songs with mass shotgun-firing. (From Sweeney, Phillip: The
Virgin Directory of World Music, Henry Holt, 1991.)

5.Forbidden filmi:

In India, a recent film song became
so popular that the police declared it a public nuisance! The song "Tirchi
Topiwale" from the film "Tridev" starts off with the cry
"Oye, oye!" People soon began to mimic the cry - it was heard
constantly, on streetcorners, in schools, in taxicabs, everywhere. The
authorities became so exasperated that the police were supposedly ordered to
start fining people 50 rupees (around $3.00) per shout! (From World Music: The
Rough Guide, Rough Guides/Penguin, London, 1994; also see Manuel, Peter:
Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India, University of
Chicago 1993.)

6.Functions with an edge:

At weddings in parts of North
India, groups of women sings obscenity-laden "abuse" songs directed
at the family of the groom! (From Manuel, Cassette Culture.)

7.Good, clean fun:

Rock and roll bands in the People's
Republic of China receive a special gift from the authorities if their behavior
is found to be especially satisfactory: a banner emblazoned with the words
"Good Ethics Band". Bands that play "yellow music" - music
with sexual overtones - need not apply. (From Riggs, Peter "Country
Report: China" in the journal Popular Music vol. 16 #4 Winter 1992.)

8.Hair-hopping Hasid:

Orthodox Jewish musician Michael
Joseph Gusikov became so popular in Europe in the 1830's that his traditional
hairstyle spurred a trend. "His peyes
- the ritual sidecurls of Orthodox Jewish men - generated a women's fashion fad
in Paris called coiffure a la Gusikov." (From Sapoznik, Henry: Klezmer!, Schirmer, 1999.)

9.Illicit Uum:

Legend has it that the scarf
customarily held by the legendary Arabic singer Uum Kalthoum during her
performances was coated with opium! (From World Music: The Rough Guide.)

10.Lesson from Plovdiv:

For years Bulgarian traditional
instruments were made by the musicians and tuned to their tastes ­ with no
common rules for tuning. This was okay, because the instruments were usually
played individually. But during the 1935 Christmas season a group of solo
instrumentalists who were playing with choral groups in Plovidiv were asked by
a member of Plovidiv's Western-style orchestra why they didn't play together.
The answer: They hadn't thought of it. They were aware of ensemble performance
- there were brass bands and cafe orchestras in their home town of Bistrica.
But it wasn't really in their vocabulary to conceive of an ensemble of
traditional music ­ somebody from outside the tradition had to suggest it.
So they went back and built new instruments that worked in tune together, and
thus formed Bistrica Foursome, the first Bulgarian folk orchestra - or so the
story goes. Bistrica did a little dancing too, and once hit the floorboards so
hard on a finale that all four members fell through the stage, leaving just
their heads visible to the audience's delight. - from The Origin of the Folk
Orchestra in Bulgaria by Tim Rice in Traditions, published by the Balkan Arts
Center, Spring 1974.

11.Morbid merengue:

A popular style of merengue
originating from rural parts of the Dominican Republic is known as "perico
ripiao". While it also is suggestive of a hard-living sort of lifestyle,
the name literally translates as "ripped parrot." (From The Virgin
Directory of World Music.)

12.Moshing with the Mob:

Lubay (probably spelled
incorrectly, I apologize), the supernostalgic cossack-loving leaders among
Russia's neoczarist mobster-sponsored "mob rock" bands, sings a song
calling for Russia to re-annex Alaska! (From a National Public Radio report by
Brooke Gladstone, January 31, 1994.)

13.Norwegian hoedown:

In 1930s Minnesota and other
midwestern states there was a huge craze for Scandinavian country and western
music, with bands like "Skarning and his Norwegian Hillbillies" led
by Thorstein I. Skarning, "the hillbilly Hurok of mid-continent"
performing such alltime favorites as "I Been a Swede from Nort'
Dakota". (From Greene, Victor: A Passion for Polka: Old-Time Ethnic Music
in America, University of California, 1992.)

14.Praise Him:

Perhaps the most popular and
oft-requested song in the repertoire of Mali's most distinguished singer, Salif
Keita, is "Mandjou", a song that lavishes praise upon disgraced
former Malian dictator and mass murderer Sekou Traore. While most other singers
quickly excised praise songs for Traore and his associates from their
repertoire after he was deposed, Keita stubbornly refused to alter his set. Countless
Amnesty International supporters and other well-meaning lefties (myself
included) have boogied down to this Malian rock classic at world music
festivals worldwide, blissfully ignorant of its lyrical content. Perhaps
because Keita is so beloved, Malians too seem to have no problem with the song,
even if friends or family suffered at the hands of the despot. (From Eyre, Banning, In Griot Time, Temple University Press, 2000.)

15.Santana Saved:

Mexican-born rock star Carlos
Santana recently announced that he had spoken to the country's most revered
religious figure -- the Virgin of Guadalupe -- while praying. Santana, who rose
to fame with hits like 'Black Magic Woman' and recently headed the U.S. album
charts with his band's album 'Supernatural,' also declared that marijuana was
not a drug. (Source: Reuters news service)

16.Paranoid pursestrings:

The Czech communist government at
its doctrinaire peak was so zealous in its censorship that it once censured
bubblegum singer Karel Gott for using this lyric: "I may as well flip a
coin when I ask if you're sincere when you say you love me." Why? Because
they said it was an insult to the value of the Czech currency! (From Ramet,
editor: Rocking the State, Westview Press.)

17.Polka pudding:

When the new favorite dance of
Parisian High Culture, the polka, was introduced in the US in 1844, it gave
rise to numerous jokes about US Presidential candidate J.K. Polk. And polka
soon became so big in Britain that a pudding was named after it. (From the New
Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians, volume 15, Macmillan 1980.)

18.Polkaprop:

During World War II, anti-German
sentiment was so rampant that Pat Wilfahrt of "Whoopie John"
Wilfahrt's Germanic polka band was accused of revealing military secrets to
Nazi agents by playing morse code messages on his drumkit. (From A Passion for
Polka.)

19.Post-mortem pan:

After Desperados Steelband leader
Rudolph Charles died, his body was paraded through the Streets of Trinidad<
/A> in a coffin made from two giant steeldrums! (From Malm, Krister and
Wallis, Roger Media Policy and Music Activity, Routledge, New York 1992.)

20.Postpunk perquisite:

One method of insuring good jobs for
families of Communist officials in pre-glasnost Soviet Union was through a deal
that was worked out with certain officially-sanctioned rock bands: In exchange
for being provided with state-of-the-art equipment, the bands were required to
"hire" a few of these generally non-musical Party family-members to
"play" with the bands. But when the bands played live gigs, the
instruments sported by these "mandatory members" were not plugged in.
(From Rocking the State.)

21.Pump up the jargon:

When "disco fever" hit mainland
China, Beijing-ites boogied down to disco versions of Mao's 8 Revolutionary
Operas! The Russian answer to post-Maoist disco is today's
"Sov-retro" movement - bands doing satirical versions of old Soviet
government decrees and poems by Marx. And Latvian rock band Cement specializes
in self-consciously corny new-wave and heavy metal versions of the 50s Soviet
government's propagandistic "social realist" songs. (From Manuel,
Peter: Popular Musics of the Non-Western World, Oxford, New York 1988 and Ramet,
Rocking the State.)

22.Rabbinical rembetika:

The Columbia Greek Orchestra, a
band that recorded popular Greek tunes in the 1920s, was actually a Jewish
klezmer group playing under assumed names! Such crosscultural impersonation was
not uncommon during the first world music boom - for example, Brooklyn-born
polka clarinetist and bandleader Bernie Witkowski, creator of the conga polka,
became "Bernardo Blanco" whenever he took his music "south of
the border". And seminal Tex-Mex accordionist Narciso Martinez had many of
his polkas listed in Victor records' Polish Catalogue with the band credited as
"Polish Kwartet" (From the liner notes to Folklyric LP 9034,
"Klezmer Music: Early Yiddish Instrumental Music", and A Passion for
Polka.)

23.Root canal polka:

Slovenian-American polka king
Frankie Yankovic's musical mentor was his dentist, part-time polka composer and
bandleader William Lausche. (From A Passion for Polka.)

24.Serpents on the cutting edge:

Indian snakecharmers no longer use
old-fashioned traditional tunes to charm their snakes - instead, they play
popular melodies from current Indian films! (From Charlton, Hannah and Marre,
Jeremy Beats of the Heart, Pluto, London 1985, and Marre's documentary film
about Indian music, "There'll Always be Stars in the Sky." For more
on the widespread appropriation of film songs in Indian folk music, see the
article "Recycling Indian Film-Songs: Popular music as a source of
melodies for North Indian folk musicians" by Scott Marcus in the journal
Asian Music volume 24 #1 Fall/Winter 1992-3, and also Manuel's Cassette
Culture.)

25.Soapy sire:

Until the last century, Gambian
praise-singers ("griots") were employed by the royal court to sing
praise songs about the king. A lyric from the praise-song repertoire honoring
Mussa Mollo, the last great Gambian king, refers to Mollo as "The Great
Bar of Soap". That's because he's said to have been as valuable to the
people as a bar of soap is to a person washing clothes. (From
"Manding/Fula Relations" by Roderic Knight in the Journal African
Music volume 6 #2, 1982.)

26.Theatre of health:

In classical Vietnamese
music-theatre (Tuong), there is a 100-act play ("Von Buu Trinh
Tuong") in which all of the characters are personified medications! The
stronger the medication, the stronger the character, and vice-versa. Another
fun fact about Tuong: At performances, a drum was placed in front of the stage,
which audience members played in order to criticize the performers. The number
of beats played and the pitch of the drumbeats indicated whether the audience
felt the play was good or bad, or if perhaps they wished to discuss the
performance with the manager. One beat on the drum, for instance, told the
performers to wind up whatever they were singing and get on to the next part!
(From Pham Duy, Musics of Vietnam, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale,
1975.)

27.Too close for comfort?

The Ainu people, originally from
islands north of Japan, traditionally entertained themselves by singing into
each other's mouths! (From Malm, Willian, Japanese Music and Musical Instruments,
Tuttle, Vermont 1990 edition.)

28.What would Sinatra say?

It is not uncommon for vocalists
singing duets on Algerian rai albums to record their separate parts as much as
five years apart! (I seem to have lost track of my precise source for this one,
but for further reading on rai try the Philip Sweeney's chapter on Rai in
Francis Hanly and Tim May [editors], Rhythms of the World, BBC Books, London
1990, or World Music: The Rough Guide.)

29.What’s in a name?

Congolese musician Fidele Babindamana,
like many of his peers, played under a stage nickname, in his case “Fidele
Zizi.”This was all well and good
until one day in the 80s he introduced himself by this nickname to a
receptionist at the French music performing rights society (SACEM) office.At which point the entire secretarial
staff burst out in laughter.Turns
out his nickname in French means literally “faithful wee-wee.”Apparently it doesn’t have quite the
same meaning in Kinshasa!From
Gary Stewart, Rumba on the River, Verso, London and New York, 2000.

30.Wild and crazy guys:

Sixties Czech rock band the
Primitives was known for its in-concert audience participation
"celebrations" of the four elements. Especially attention-getting was
their celebration of water, known as fishfest, in which they hurled buckets of
water into the audience and then threw live fish over them (From Rocking the
State.)